Mushrooms, Mushrooms, Everywhere! — Disappointment Ranch

We have had a huge flush of mushrooms lately here at the ranch; I haven’t been able to keep up! There’s been a ton of rain, and while my tomatoes aren’t happy, the mushrooms are ecstatic. Free food everywhere. The major downside to mushrooms is that they usually take forever to clean. Some are better than others, but cleaning is usually the most time consuming part.

A huge Wood Blewit mushroom. They are so much fun to pick!

We cultivate some mushrooms, but most of the ones that we collect in the fall are wild ones. Always be sure of your mushroom identification!!! We have been collecting for years and have slowly added to our knowledge over time. We have several mushroom identification guides that we use, and I always refresh my knowledge every year. The first time I collect something in a season, I carefully check to make sure that it is what I remember. This is what I have been collecting and desperately trying to process lately:

Wood Blewits

I love the color of these huge mushrooms. Now if it would only stick around when cooked!

These are a nice meaty mushroom, but not terribly distinctive in taste. They seem more like a button mushroom, and that’s how I use them. However, NEVER eat wild mushrooms raw! People have gotten seriously sick from eating wild mushrooms that are otherwise edible. Also, be aware that there is a poisonous look-alike that has rusty red spores. I do a spore print every year when I start collecting these, just to be sure I remember exactly what they look like. The wood blewits have been going crazy! I collected 18.5 pounds one evening, and several more pounds a few days later. I collected and froze about 20 pounds last year, and we used all of them, so I feel like I can’t waste them. These usually aren’t too bad to clean. I use a natural bristle basting brush to clean off the tops and I cut the stems off. The stems get dried and powdered, the caps either get dehydrated or cooked and then frozen. There are so many of these that I use the oven rather than a frying pan to cook off some of the water and get them ready for the freezer. I drain the liquid that cooks out of them and save it for stock. I almost never freeze mushrooms raw; they just don’t turn out well.

These pop up all over in my wood chip mulch in the fall. Free food ready to pick!

Maitake

This is one of our very favorite wild mushrooms. You can cultivate them too, but we never have. They are more difficult to cultivate than shitakes or oyster mushrooms. They are a full-flavored mushroom and have a lot of umami. Maitakes are also known as Hen of the Woods, but you will find more recipes for them by searching for “Maitake recipes”. Usually we find one or two of these in our woods. This year they haven’t shown up, but we’re still hoping. We do know someone though who has a huge one that shows up right by their driveway every year, and they don’t want it (!!!). We’re happy to take it off their hands. This year we got 12 pounds of maitake from them. Fabulous. Our favorite thing to do with it is make Maitake Bacon. So yummy. This recipe works best if you have a convection oven. The fan helps dry out the petals and make them crispy, otherwise it takes too long and they can easily get burnt.

My setup for cleaning mushrooms. I had to get a much larger stockpot out!

A bit over a gallon of Maitake stock and a quart of Wood Blewit stock ready for the freezer!

I separate the mushrooms into three bowls, cleaning as I go. One bowl is perfect, clean petals – these I make into the maitake bacon. Most of it disappears into my family’s stomachs immediately, but I try to make enough to put some into the freezer. Anything that is still good to eat in soups or stir-fries, etc. goes into another bowl to be partially sautéed and then frozen, or just dehydrated. The last bowl is for the tougher core and anything that I couldn’t clean well enough for it to go into the second bowl. Maitake grows around anything in its path which can include twigs, leaves and dirt. I make stock with the contents of the last bowl, and that goes into the freezer too. I got over a gallon of stock this year! It is a great meat stock replacement, or when you just want to add a little different flavor to a recipe. And, the stock leftovers go to the pigs. As we say at our house: “Convert to pork!” So many wonderful things to make from this mushroom. As with all the mushrooms though, cleaning them is the most difficult and time-consuming part. Since I put zero effort into their production though, it’s hard to complain.

Honey Mushrooms

Please exercise extra caution collecting honey mushrooms. I collected, spore printed and discarded a lot of them before I felt comfortable with recognizing all of the features. There are some seriously dangerous look-alikes. Now that I can recognize both honeys and their look-alikes, they don’t seem that similar, but when I first started, I had a hard time telling them apart. I still always, always refresh my memory every year. They are a delicious mushroom though. They don’t have much flesh to them, so it takes a lot to make a serving, but they are worth it. My kids absolutely adore them. I have never preserved these since they disappear as fast as they come out of the pan. We just sauté them in a little bit of butter and salt. All wild mushrooms need to be thoroughly cooked, but honeys especially. They can cause some major discomfort if undercooked. You’ve been warned.

Shrimp of the Woods

These have a lot of common names: Hunter’s Heart, Aborted Entoloma, and my father-in law’s name for them: Shrimpers. Hint: if you look up Shrimpers Mushrooms, you won’t find anything. I wouldn’t collect or eat them for years because I couldn’t figure out what the actual mushroom was. It turns out that it is actually two mushrooms. There has been some disagreement as to which mushroom is parasitizing the other, but it seems like mycologists have now decided that the entoloma mushroom is parasitizing a honey mushroom. Whichever it is, the result is delicious. The key thing about these is to make sure that you brown them, otherwise they taste like nothing. I have used them as a shrimp substitute in recipes, and that works pretty well. They certainly don’t taste exactly like shrimp, but they go with the same kind of flavors. To preserve them, I brown them first and then freeze. I haven’t tried dehydrating them. They are so spongy; I am not sure how that would turn out.

Puffballs

These are so much fun to find - I wish they were as much fun to eat!

This is more of a group of mushrooms. There are several different kinds out right now, ranging from huge to tiny. I refer to them as the tofu of mushrooms. They pretty much absorb whatever flavors you add to them, but as themselves – they basically taste like nothing. Today B. and I found a huge puffball. It was in the perfect stage of ripeness too. I was excited because I didn’t have anything planned for lunch. I cooked it in bacon grease, and it still tasted like nothing. Aargh. These are so plentiful and huge that it would be nice to be able to do something fabulous with them, but they are just not that awesome. With so many other mushrooms around at the same time, it is better to just skip them. That is my take anyway – not that I ever listen to myself. I still try puffballs and am disappointed every year. Be aware that one of the most deadly mushrooms can look like a puffball in its very earliest stages. The Death Angel is a white mushroom that comes up from a kind of egg sac in the ground. If you cut open what you think is a puffball and it has what looks like an undeveloped mushroom inside, get rid of it and wash everything that it touched. They are not hard to tell apart at all if you know what to look for, it is just something to be aware of. Puffballs should be pure white and solid when you cut them open. Always use good identification guides. I will put a list of some that I use at the end of the article.

Oyster Mushrooms

These are an excellent mushroom that we cultivate. We have tried to grow them on wood chips several times without success, but finally put the effort into mushroom logs. We had considered these as a crop, but we pretty much suck at all kinds of farming, and these, while prolific, are not something that I would want to sell to people. They get too dirty when grown outside – it seems like dirt comes out of nowhere to attach to them, and we don’t have a suitable place inside to grow them either. So, that idea, like many of our farming adventures fell by the wayside. Such it is at Disappointment Ranch.

Baby oyster mushrooms looking so promising.

I process these like most mushrooms – sauté and then freeze. I haven’t tried dehydrating yet. Sometimes I chop them up and freeze them in ice cube trays so that it is easy to just dump some into a frying pan with eggs, or a pot of soup. They have their own flavor. I am not sure what to compare it to, but it is pretty mild, nowhere near as strong as maitake. There are plenty of recipes that use oyster mushrooms specifically, but I find they can be used as a general-purpose mushroom as well.

Shitake

This is far and away our favorite mushroom. I think I could eat these every day and not get sick of them. They are spectacular. We cultivate these on logs, and they don’t even get very dirty. In fact, they are probably the easiest mushroom to clean – that we have on the ranch. However, mushroom logs are a pain to inoculate. We had the girls help us inoculate a bunch a few years ago, and it was a lot of work. I would like to be able to grow and sell these, but I don’t think that I could get my family to help me in the initial stages. Plus, Jake would say that it was a waste of effort. He is always into those pesky things like making sure that the effort required would actually result in a financial gain that was worth it. I know that there are people who make money at that kind of thing, but given our track record, I can’t see that being us. We would probably put in a major effort to inoculate logs and then have some kind of disaster which ruined them all. Sigh.

We do get some mushrooms off of our logs, but not as many as I had hoped. We hardly ever have a big enough flush to put some in the freezer, but it has happened occasionally. When it does, I partially sauté them and then freeze, just like with many of the others. In one of Paul Stamets books (maybe Mycelium Running?) he talks about drying them in the sun gills up which drastically increases their vitamin D content. I have yet to try this, mainly because when I have flushes of shitakes is when the weather is rainy or overcast for long periods of time.

There are so many recipes out there that specify shitakes. We love them simply with eggs. They have such a distinctive flavor though, that they enhance most dishes. Stir fries, soups, sandwiches – all taste better with some shitakes in them. I wish we had more…

Please remember these safety tips when collecting/growing mushrooms:

1. Use an excellent mushroom identification guide, and preferable several. Use regional guides as well as more general ones. Refresh your memory regularly. Don’t assume that you remember from year to year!

2. Cook thoroughly. Some otherwise harmless mushrooms can cause some severe discomfort if you don’t cook them properly.

3. Learn what the poisonous and deadly species in your area look like and be able to identify them as well. This is as important as being able to identify the edible ones.

As with adding anything new to your diet, try a little at first. I once ate a whole bunch of chestnut boletes only to find that they give me terrible gas! Whew! You may also have allergies that you aren’t aware of.

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Guides that I use - try to find a regional guide for your area. Also, these are guides that I bought probably 8 years or so ago when I started collecting wild mushrooms. There many be more/better ones out there now, but this is my collection.

Edible Wild Mushrooms of Illinois & Surrounding States - this is probably my favorite guide. It is regional and hence extremely useful, and it has recipes and a fun narrative style.

Mushrooming Without Fear - I like this one too. It has a lot of highly detailed photographs pointing out the differences and it is a great beginner’s guide. It doesn’t cover any gilled mushrooms though on the premise that gilled mushrooms are harder to identify. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but it is still a useful book.

100 Edible Mushrooms - This covers many more mushrooms than the previous two books. It has a lot of details too, but not nearly as many photos per species. I like the narrative style and the edibility rating. On one mushroom that we have growing around here he rates the edibility as bad and says that they taste like a Brillo pad. Strangely enough, after that description I have never been tempted to try them!

Mushrooms - A Peterson Field Guide - This is, of course, the extensive field guide that belongs in every mushroom hunter’s collection. I usually use it when I am discovering a new edible mushroom. I always want to check multiple guides to make sure that I am identifying everything correctly. I find that different descriptions of the same mushroom help me feel confident about my identification. Kind of like having a math problem explained several different ways makes it click better.

In my opinion there is too much fear surrounding mushrooms. Yes, a healthy dose of caution is necessary, but I would say that this is true of many things that people don’t think about that much. Handling raw chicken can be dangerous if not done properly! Mushrooms can offer us a truly sustainable, delicious and free food source that is underutilized. Use a sensible amount of caution, but have fun too!